Nitwit13

I think mine was Maze Game on an Apple II when I was 4. It was hooked up to a TV rather than a monitor. My first NES game was - unsurprisingly - Super Mario Bros. Between the Apple II and NES though was probably an Atari 2600 at my babysitter's. I don't remember which was the first game on there, but my favourite was Centipede.

@BloodNinja @MindfulGamer Yes, but how many nerds can a Kirby heard if a Kirby herd heards nerds?

This sounds like it could have been the precursor to Angry Birds, what with flinging Kirby across levels with the mouse. I'm not sure if there were other games that were the prototype of that kind of mechanic in the 90s. Just imagine Kid Kirby being as popular as Angry Birds.

@PharoneTheGnome I've been wondering for ages what's going on with the Gameboys they always use for headline images on this site! I thought maybe I was just mis-remembering and that Gameboy actually DID have a backlight, or they came out with a revision of original Gameboy or something.

Was I the only player who just couldn't get boxing to work? I mean, it was a fun game and all, but infuriating when the Wiimote and Nunchuck wouldn't do what you thought they should do. I remember playing and beating the easy computer; but as I got to the higher levels it always seemed like suddenly my boxer just wouldn't throw punches any more. And I remember having like 17 tries with a friend once and getting so frustrated because my boxer just wouldn't punch. Guess it was just me...

@TheRealKyleHyde Yes. A proper noun because it is a name, a word we capitalise. With the example of “google it,” that’s using the word as a verb.

Also lest we forget this egregious example of using Nintendo as a genericized term, 1991’s Hudson Hawk: https://youtu.be/k-5CZn8Wi9I

@Donutman I remember an issue of Nintendo Power that had a letter in the letter section about someone whose Gameboy was run over by a car and - though looking pretty rough - still worked! I guess the Gameboy WAS the Otterbox of the day.

I do love Chrono Trigger, and Secret of Mana used to be my favourite... But Seiken Densetsu 3 has quickly risen to the top. The sound quality is top notch!

@noobish_hat I'm not certain, but I do think that exercise, or using your body helps to strengthen your bones; that is that things like jumping or running is kind of "exercising" your skeleton to make it stronger... But I'm not certain about how that all works.

Faster load times.

I am genuinely surprised that Arcade's Revenge for SNES ranked as high as it did. I thought it was one of the worse games, even though I owned this one.

But yeah... Pretty rad soundtrack.

@Rayquaza2510 But the psychology of the human brain/mind is way more complicated than "I see a celebrity, I buy." There might be a tiny portion of people that would say, buy a video game because they once saw an ad of some celebrity playing it and state that as their explicit reason...

But the reasons companies spend millions of dollars on ads and hiring ad agencies is because they work and because they have studied how to tap into psychology; in a lot of cases, it's not that someone likes a celebrity, it's just the fact that they've now heard of a product, and that attention was perhaps drawn in the first place because of a known celebrity. In some cases companies will even create annoying, weird, or hated ads. Not because they failed to make the product look appealing; no, so that people remember and talk about the product. Case in point: we're all sitting here vaguely discussing this ad even though it seems most people on this site don't really care about the celebrity.

If you ever get a chance, and can find it online, I highly recommend watching the 2002 documentary The Century of Self by Adam Curtis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self). It explores in some details how psychology has been used to manipulate the masses (yes, even me) to get them to consume more. A great example is how Edward Bernays marketed smoking to women at a time where it was seen as un-feminine and was able to basically help sell tobacco to another 50% of the population.

"We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed... Man's desires must overshadow his needs." - Paul Mazur, 1927.

Anyway, apologies for the long rambling.

I was hoping the physical edition would be several arcade cabinet replicas shipped to your home.

@BloodNinja Well, no. Plagiarism is copying something word for word. What I was trying to make an analogy of is like if you write an article on how Ocarina of Time has been reverse engineered. I read the article and then wrote my own article using my own and different words to report the same thing. From what I understood in this article the people here recreated the game using a different code; maybe a different coding language even?

If a book is translated into a different language I don’t think that’s considered plagiarism by law or rule (though I’m not certain on that). That’s why they need to hire a translator who basically recreates the whole work with different words. I’m not sure of the legality of say an unsanctioned or unofficial translation of a book.

@Hordak True… But my understanding from the article was not that they copied the code but actually recreated the game with all new code. So using your article analogy it would be like reading your article and then saying the same thing only using different words.

That’s why I was a bit confused by the term reverse engineered. My understanding of that term was that they somehow figured out how all the original code works, not just made it again in a new code.

@Chocobo_Shepherd I haven't had a chance to watch this video yet, but this woman's past few videos (and articles) are intense exercises of deep dives into actual library archives. She unearths some pretty interesting tidbits that go beyond a person using a web search engine to find someone else's blog.

It's not jazz, but Square Enix had a performance called Symphonic Fantasies in 2009 that had some epic arrangements of Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and Final Fantasy. I highly recommend checking it out: https://www.gameconcerts.com/en/concerts/symphonic-fantasies/

@rushiosan @CactusMan I love the Brink of Time album... It was one I randomly stumbled upon 15 years ago when I found one "chrono trigger jazz" track and listened to just that for a few years before discovering that it was form an official album. I also did not realise that the To Far Away Times CD was from 1995!

@Ralizah Man alive... I bought Red Dead Redemption 2 on special on Steam... Only to be thwarted by the terrible Rockstar launcher. I fiddled and faddled with it for hours but could not get it to work so had to request a refund.

I thought the whole idea was that the physical carts WEREN’T tasty… 😋

Just wanted to throw out there that the Secret History of Mac Gaming book at Bitmap books was just re-released! I wonder if this game is mentioned in there.
https://www.bitmapbooks.co.uk/products/the-secret-history-of-mac-gaming-expanded-edition

The Immortal is a cool game... But I originally played it on an Apple IIGS, and so I think that version is superior to the Genesis or the NES... My memory could be off, but I don't remember it being so stuttery or janky. Isometric puzzlers are too under-represented these days.

@RolyTheBeerGeek Missed opportunity to dress the dog as mini-Kraid.

@Eel Yes, a single card. Pretty wild. What I found most amusing in the NPR article was that it says the report did not specify WHICH Pokemon card it was.

@Duffman92 If you tell us the name of your as* we might be able to tell you why you'd buy this.

@HotGoomba Sleep tight. Don't let the metroids blight.

@Kyloctopus It's funny you say that, because I actually find it a too generic of a title when it comes to search engines... The numbers 1 and 2, and the word "switch" which is also the name of the console. I mean, mostly on web search engines they know what you mean... But when I was looking for this game on eBay I would often get results for other games... Syberia 1 & 2 for example. But perhaps you're right if you're sorting alphabetically.

I wonder where Boshi fits in to all of this.
https://www.mariowiki.com/Boshi

To be honest, I'm kind of surprised the Transformers TV show didn't have a video game console transformer... Kind of like how they had Soundwave and Blaster with their cassette bots.

It's pretty fun. If you like light turn based games I got a lot of hours out of this one. And I mean, middling graphics? It's a pixel graphics game!

@AlexanderDaniels I would LOVE to see a well done remake of that game. The soundtrack was simply superb, and I loved the voyage around the world, but I would hope to see the action RPG mechanics get an overhaul - it was pretty basic, and it was kind of annoying how you'd only get an "experience" point by clearing each room, rather than each enemy.

From 2004 - 2008 I used to do a two hour video game music radio show in my town. It was funny because back then if I told people that's what I was doing, I'd get the classic, "How do you just play bleeps and bloops on the radio?" Today, I feel like the concept would be way more understandable as I think VGM has really moved a lot closer to the mainstream (i.e. people know that VGM is not just random sound effects but actually music).

Around the same time I was once so (mock) offended at a friend who made a distinction between video game music and "real" music that I created a whole series of albums/playlists where I'd compile VGM and non-VGM music together on a CD and she had to sit there and guess which ones she thought were from a video game and which ones weren't. She didn't do so well, which is why the series ended up being called "Clarissa gets an F"

Confession time: I’ve only just now realised after reading this that the opening of Ocarina of Time was based on the flute song from Legend of Zelda/Super Mario Bros. 3. It was there the whole time!

This article is old - from 2006 - but an interesting precedent in the selling of unofficial guides. It's basically about a guy who was making World of Warcraft guides and selling them on Ebay. Blizzard sent heaps of takedown notices to Ebay. The guide maker counter-sued Blizzard claiming he wasn't violating copyright.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/warcraft-maker-sued-for-blocking-sales-of-unofficial-guide/
A snippet: "In effect, if the video game industry's actions are upheld, 'then selling a how-to book about Microsoft Word would infringe Microsoft's copyright, especially if the book contained one or more screenshots of Word's user interface,'"
"The case points to a broader problem, Levy said: large companies that send takedown notices with abandon to eBay and jeopardize the prosperity of smaller sellers."

So I've been reading through a portion of these comments on this discussion, and I still come away with one big question: if it's either illegal or undesired by companies for these unofficial guides to exist, why have they not only existed in great quantities over the last few decades, but are sold openly? As it was pointed out by some earlier, every game shop in the past had stacks of guides for sale and every unofficial video game magazine traded in copyrighted intellectual property. Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition has had Mario or some other Nintendo character on the cover since 2008.

Moving beyond just video game guides being sold online, there are unofficial guides for almost every form of media out there that are sold online and in bookshops. I work in a library and we have heaps of books from huge publishers that are publishing unofficial guides to TV shows, video games, and software. They all contain copyrighted material by way of screenshots. Like the above quote pointed out, if it was illegal, then wouldn't a guide on Microsoft Word also be illegal?

Maybe it really all just boils down to which companies decide to pursue certain authors/publishers. Maybe it's like some have said that it's all a copyright violation, but Microsoft decides not to shut down the "For Dummies" series on all of its Microsoft guides. ¯(ツ)/¯

Wow. I have never heard of the board game Labyrinth. Was it one that was big in the UK and not in the U.S. or Australia? I do remember the OTHER other labyrinths that were semi-popular in the 80s: the big wooden box maze where you controlled the tilt with two knobs and tried to navigate a metal ball from start to finish.

Here's some that I don't often see get any recognition, even amongst most video game music podcasts:

• Magcician (NES) - Abadon Battle: https://youtu.be/OM25EnTM6Ng
  I'm seriously impressed and surprised by the quality and rocking quality of this song from an obscure NES game.
• Super R-Type: Dream of a Labyrinth: https://youtu.be/fPpECBA2QKE
  Okay, maybe this one isn't as deep of a dive, but it's so funky.
• King Arthur's World - Funky Goblin: https://youtu.be/jiGubl6HQWA
  How can you possibly get MORE funky than Funky Goblin?

Love to see all these other suggestions in the comments here. I love to discover new music.

I've recently fallen down the video game vaporwave hole on YouTube. While it's not 10 hours, and it's technically a vaporwave remix of another song, I got pulled in to this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPGB3TqIHVI&t=333s&ab_channel=h2643
Seriously, does this not look like the trippiest Super Mario World map? If only Mario Maker 2 could do course worlds like this. It's a song that was used in the romhack Mario's Mystery Meat.

@BoilerBroJoe I loved discovering those albums too. I think I remember about 15 years ago or so the CDs were selling for over $100 each!

One of my favourite tracks from this game was Starring Wario. But yeah, it's pretty hilarious to see the characters just do their awkward arm swings and rocking back and forth and then have the announcer at the end ask, "Can I call you a dancing master!?"

https://youtu.be/0cLU45R6lCw

I saw this one on GameCenter CX recently; episode 205, season 19. It was fun to watch.

@Panopticon I too have always liked the colored buttons, but what I DO prefer for the U.S. controllers is that the Y and X buttons are concave. I don't know why... maybe it's just because it's what I grew up with.

I too used to play this on the 7800 and I loved it. It was an ultimate fantasy at that age to just run around and throw food at people.

@Ganner @Zeldafan79 Steam is water in gas form and was used to propel a large portion of the industrial revolution. A SWITCH was usually used to release the steam to do the work. =o)

@Hero8-Bit I get what you're saying here about using physical materials to make physical cartridges and cases (e.g. using oil to make plastic), but I think the lesser known environmental cost of non-physical is the amount of energy used to power servers and harddrives that are storing information. I think Nintendolife (or perhaps Kotaku) may have even done an article on the environmental impact of the growing streaming game services. I'm curious about how much energy Valve uses for its services.

I too loved the SNES Lord of the Rings game. I mean, I hated that the very first quest was a lengthy, monotonous fetch quest in caves that had ZERO music. But I too was taken by the concept that you could theoretically have up to FIVE players play simultaneously! That beats Secret of Mana. Play well? No. The camera focused on player one, and the rest of the players could wander off screen and be killed.

@OldManHermit I'm just trying to find the definition right now... For research purposes. Are you using something like Merriam-Webster or the OED? =D

@ECHIDNA Or staying up until 2am? I'm in Australia (East Coast) too.

@Kyloctopus Fair enough.

@Kyloctopus I could be wrong, but when I hear the term "metroidvania" it makes me think of a side-scrolling, Metroid/Castlevania style game... Where the description of this game as "Secret of Mana vibes" makes me think it's a top-down. Has there ever been a top-down game that's described as a metroidvania? Maybe that's why they use the term explor-action.

I'm also curious about where it says "seamless pixel art world." I wonder if this means there are no rooms, screens, or whatever meaning like the whole world is just one giant map/screen to explore on.

@Chowdaire @PortuGuy It sounds in the trailer that they're playing a section from the digitised version of "Highway Star" by Deep Purple, so I am assuming that maybe they licensed the music again: Paranoid, Peter Gunn, Highway Star, Bad to the Bone. This was one of my top ten SNES games. I loved Rock 'n' Roll Racing. Also Blackthorne was pretty atmospheric and cool when it was released, along the lines of Flashback.